Have Frat Boys Finally Jumped the Pop Culture Shark?

The last few weeks have been kind of a buzzkill for frat boys and the people who love them — or at least, love targeting their market segment.

The buzzy frat-com “21 and Over” — directed and written by the screenwriting team behind the blockbuster hit “The Hangover” — recently opened with the comatose thud of a post-exams senior after an all-night bender, stunning its studio, Relativity, with an $8.7 million opening that was less than half of what analysts had projected.

The weekend before, a billion global movie fans were subjected to the slow-motion disaster that was “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane’s attempt to host the Oscars — a bizarre layer cake of immaturity and inappropriateness, which The Atlantic’s Richard Lawson called “a new level of misguided….middlebrow frat-boy hero emcees Hollywood’s glitziest night [with] boob jokes and gay jokes and fat jokes and a general dismissive smugness.”

But immaturity, inappropriateness, and yes, dismissive smugness are at the very core of the stereotypical frat-boy persona. And for the past three and a half decades, ever since the unlikely 1978 smash “Animal House” made toga parties an actual thing, America has looked on the frat archetype and laughed along. Now it’s time to ask:

Has the laughter finally died?

Maybe it’s wishful to think that America’s love affair with this icon of white privilege and serially abusive nihilism is over. After all, while thousands of people slammed MacFarlane for his Oscar antics, thousands also defended him. Still, the reaction to his performance felt palpably different than the flaring (and quickly tamped down) outrage over past incidents of Hollywood insensitivity.

The tone that prevailed was less one of anger than a kind of horrified dismay, rooted in the recognition that the zeitgeist has moved past the kind of racebaiting and casual misogyny that MacFarlane evidenced in at the Awards. Women, blacks, Hispanics and Asians, lesbians and gays were at the creative core of most if not all the works being honored, making jokes about boobies and the sexual availability of 9-year-old girls and black domestic violence and Latin accents feel not just uncomfortable and creepy…but dated.

The same critique applies to “21 and Over,” a film that showcases the crude pivot that frat-com purveyors are trying to make so as to better reflect a world of decidedly different demographics. The film follows the catastrophic aftermath of a reckless bar-hopping expedition the film’s protagonists, Miller and Casey, stage to celebrate the 21st birthday of their best friend. Though primary protagonists Miller and Casey, played by Miles Teller (“Footloose”) and Skylar Astin (“Pitch Perfect”), are white, their alleged “best friend,” Jeff Chang (“Twilight”’s Justin Chon), is Asian, and the fictitious campus the trio journey across has a studied diversity to its gatherings and crowds. Unfortunately, every person of color onscreen is presented simply as a target of opportunity for the protagonists’ misuse and exploitation, from the members of a Latina sorority to ostensible tritagonist Jeff Chang (as a repeated means of emphasizing his Asianness, he’s always called “Jeff Chang,” and his character is even listed in the credits as “JeffChang” — no space!).

He’s pushed to binge on booze until he’s comatose. He’s thrown out of second-story windows while unconscious…twice. He drunkenly eats a (not yet used) tampon. He has a stuffed animal glued to, and then forcibly ripped off of, his genitals, affording the movie an opportunity for the requisite Asian-penis joke. And throughout it all, his supposed buddies assert to one another and the glazed-over audience that they love Jeff Chang and are worried about him — except for those times when they think he’s dead or maimed and merely shrug it off, smirk and give each other a fist-bump.

“21 and Over”’s basic failing seems to be that it aggressively learned the wrong lesson about the shifting profile of its target market — a lesson exemplified by the shocking low-budget success of “Harold and Kumar Goes to White Castle,” starring John Cho and Kal Penn.

A cult hit in theaters, “Harold and Kumar” was one of the biggest DVD releases of 2005, generating over $60 million in DVD sales after it hit the home market and millions more in rentals. It achieved this feat despite centering on two postcollegiate individuals who represent the ethnic antithesis of the stereotypical bro-tagonist — junior investment banker Harold Lee and med student Kumar Patel. Yes, the film contains plenty of jokes that are dependent on Lee and Patel being Asian — but they’re the ones making them, and the net result is that we’re laughing with as well as at them.

(The same can be said of the film’s sexual orientation-related humor: Because Neil Patrick Harris— who rebooted his identity and career in the H&K films — is a famously out gay man, and because his onscreen self is an impossibly debauched heterosexual, the film’s gay jokes actually end up being at the expense of homophobes in the audience.)

The film’s writers, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, weren’t trying to score diversity points in penning their protagonists. They simply based their characters on actual friends of theirs from college, who happen to be Korean and Indian. Which was hardly out of the ordinary, because when Hurwitz and Schlossberg attended University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago respectively back in 2000, Asian Americans already made up over 20% of the student body at both colleges.

And that was just the tip of the demographic iceberg. The year that the DVD version of “Harold & Kumar” hit retail racks was the very last one in which white students made up the biggest part of new admits to the University of California school system, the nation’s largest and most prestigious state college network. The next year, in 2006, Asians for the first time made up the single biggest group of freshman admissions to UC schools: 36 percent, with whites trailing at 35.6 percent. The gap has widened since then, with Asians making up 36.3 percent and whites now making up 28.2 percent of the UC’s 2012 entering freshmen.

The bottom line is that on more and more college campuses, the “normal” college student looks like Harold or Kumar. So the fact that “21 and Over” includes an Asian American character within its trinity of main characters might be seen as market-smart casting. Treating him as the film’s primary punching bag and object of derision — not quite as smart. And not necessary, given that H&K proved that it’s possible to do raunchy and even racially provocative humor without crossing the line into, you know, actual racism. But as the great tide of demographic change washes across the nation, this kind of line-crossing is erupting more frequently and urgently.

There have been racist social media rants — the most famous being the viral “Asians in the Library” YouTube video posted by UCLA Alexandra Wallace, who fellow students name as a Delta Gamma member, with its signature “ching-chong-ling-long” approximation of Chinese or Korean, or whatever.

There have been dumb cheers at sporting events: Last April, a intramural volleyball championship game at Emory University grew tense when members of the frat Beta Theta Phi, began a loud, heckling chant of “USA! USA!” at the fans of the Asian American team their squad was facing. (Rather than shouting back, the Asian American students decided to simply join in, and even found a U.S. flag to wave. With the whole audience now shouting in chorus, the chant quickly faded in confusion.)

And of course, there’s the now-infamous “Asia Prime” soiree thrown last month by Duke’s Kappa Sigma frat, which featured a broken-English invitation (beginning with the salutation “Herro Nice Duke Peopre!”) and partygoers dressed in rice-paddy hats, kimonos and sumo outfits. The event went on despite complaints from the Asian Student Association and a warning from the administration. In protest, students printed out pictures that attendees had posted to their public Facebook walls of themselves dressed in flamboyant oriental drag, stamped them with the hashtag “#racistrager,” and posted them on bulletin boards across campus.

Incidents like these aren’t new — or limited to offending Asians. A few years ago, fraternities at UC San Diego “commemorated” Black History Month with a “Compton Cookout” party, featuring watermelon and chicken and attendees in “ghetto gear.”

In October of last year, members of the University of Florida’s Beta Theta Phi fraternity attended their “Rockstars and Rappers” party in blackface.

In November, a sorority at private Christian college Baylor University required pledges to dress as “Mexicans” (sporting sombreros, ponchos, handlebar moustaches and brown shoe polish) as part of an illegal-alien themed “Hopping the Fence” lodge welcome. Similar incidents mocking Hispanics occurred at the University of Chicago in May, where Alpha Delta Phi made pledges mow lawns in caricature Mexican outfits and Delta Upsilon threw an event called “Conquistadores and Aztec Hoes.”

“These things have been going on for years, no matter how we educate,” says Lawrence Ross, author of the definitive black fraternity history “The Divine Nine.” “Predominately white fraternities and sororities hold racist parties, claim ignorance about being insensitive, and then apologize. Every Halloween, where we typically see these parties, Greek Life offices around the country send out missives about avoiding racist themed parties. And yet they still happen.”

University of Northern Colorado professor Nicholas Syrett documents the long history of these types of events in his book on American fraternities, “The Company He Keeps,” noting that throughout the Sixties, Kappa Alpha would throw an annual Old South Ball, featuring men in Confederate Army uniforms and women in antebellum dresses dancing to the music of black “sharecropper bands.” Kappa Sigma’s chapter at California State College-Long Beach had similar Confederate-themed “South Shall Rise Again” parties, while Duke’s chapter of Zeta Beta Tau held “Chinese Open Houses” during rush week, with brothers dressing up as queue-wearing “Chinamen” and serving chop suey and rice to attract pledges.

Fraternal organizations were originally formed to provide social networks for like-minded individuals that would develop character and entrench high-minded principles. The earliest greek-letter organizations, such as Phi Beta Kappa, emphasized the love of philosophy and literature and scholarly pursuit, when those were considered the pillars of the true collegiate gentleman (PBK has since formally evolved from a fraternal order into a national honor society). Indeed, the original charter for Alpha Delta Phi — the frat whose U. of C. chapter made pledges mow lawns dressed as cartoon Mexicans — included the following description of “qualifications for membership”: “A union of good general scholarship and ability: a laudable emulation and diligence in the pursuit of learning: those qualities of mind and heart which will endear one to his fellows throughout all the pursuits of life: and a moral character above suspicion and reproach.”

The evolution of the stereotypical frat sensibility — anti-intellectual, misogynist, bigoted — has been a reaction to the progressive democratization of higher education. As students without “breeding” came into colleges in greater numbers, admitted due to academic merit rather than legacy ties, fraternities began to deemphasize scholarship and embrace academic defiance. The association of frats with sexism and female exploitation grew in parallel to the rise of coeducation; their connections with racial intolerance and insensitivity came as a response first to emancipation, and then desegregation.

All of these aspects, consciously or not, have been aimed at defending the greek wall, ensuring that the predominant character of those within the fortress stays white, Protestant and male. Membership, after all, has its privileges: A study cited in journalism professor Robert Jensen’s 2006 book “The Heart of Whiteness” found that while just 8.5 percent of university undergraduates are members of greek letter organizations, former greeks make up a quarter of Fortune 500 chief executives 48 percent of U.S. presidents, over 30 percent of congressmen and 40 percent of Supreme Court justices. As Jensen notes, “The vast majority of these people are, of course, white.”

The response of those who haven’t met these criteria over the years has been to launch their own alternatives. The first sorority, Alpha Delta Pi, was founded in 1851. The first Catholic fraternity, Phi Kappa Sigma, was founded in 1889; the first black fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, in 1906; and the first greek-letter fraternity for Chinese students, Rho Psi, in 1916. These organizations were ostensibly chartered to foster social ties for students of a particular cultural or religious heritage, but there’s no mistaking the reason for their existence: “They came into existence at a time when fraternities controlled the social scene on campus and ethnic and racial minorities were barred from membership,” writes Syrett. “Minority fraternities were not founded for the purpose of celebrating their differences; they were founded precisely because their differences had prevented their participation in the first place.”

Brian Gee, chair of the National APIA Panhellenic Association, points to the case of Theta Kappa Phi, a UCLA Asian American sorority organized by a woman named Margaret Shinohara Ohara in 1959, after she was barred from membership in other societies and stripped of her Panhellenic Scholarship. “Apparently, when Ohara came to accept her scholarship, there was complete shock from the greek community that she wasn’t Irish,” he says.

Now, there are over 50 Asian American fraternities and sororities with more than 350 individual chapters at over 100 colleges, with thousands of active members and tens of thousands of alumni. While most don’t yet have the political and professional clout of historically white organizations, some Asian fraternal groups have established potent footholds in global society: the non-greek F.F. Fraternity, founded in 1910 at an early gathering of the Eastern Chinese Student Alliance Conference at Trinity College, counts among its members architect I.M. Pei, diplomat Wellington Kuo and Hong Kong billionaire Victor Fung.

But in creating a parallel path, there are concerns that cultural frats have mirrored some of the negative aspects of historically white greek groups — such the encouragement of binge drinking and the practice of hazing initiates.

In 2005, a pledge rushing the University of Texas chapter of the Asian American frat Lambda Phi Epsilon, Phanta “Jack” Phoummarath, was found dead of acute alcohol poisoning, his blood alcohol content at an astonishing 0.50 (BAC of 0.08 and above is considered legally intoxicated in most states); markers had been used to write disparaging messages on his unconscious body. His parents filed suit against LPE and won an award of $4.2 million, which they used to commission an anti-hazing video and create a scholarship foundation in their son’s honor.

“The power fraternity and sorority members get when hazing members is intoxicating, and the hazing process often validates a person’s sense of overcoming obstacles, so each generation successfully passes down the pathology to the succeeding generation, and the cycle continues,” says “Divine Nine”’s Ross. “And glorifying hazing in movies certainly doesn’t help.”

The Phoummaroth incident lends a particularly ugly cast to “21 and Over”’s depiction of Jeff Chang being encouraged by his “friends” to drink to wild excess, eventually leading to his arrest and hospitalization (played for laughs, of course). The instrument Miller and Casey use to push Jeff Chang to consume is the classic one: Challenges to his masculinity — “You look like a Chinese girl.”

There’s a broad societal pressure for Asian Americans to assert their man-propers in the face of feminine or emasculated pop-cultural depictions, never more so than in college. And because it’s self-contained — you don’t have to belong to a team, excel in an activity or be smooth with the ladies to imbibe — drinking often ends up at the core of Asian frat-manhood rituals.

It’s something that concerns the leadership of organizations like NAPA, whose goal is to encourage Asian American frats to emphasize personal bonding, self-empowerment and community service. “What would our fraternities be like if they detached themselves from the culture of ‘frat boys,’ if they treated their letters as a business suit rather than a party hat?” says Will Xu, NAPA national secretary. “That’s a question all of us ask every day, and we apply policies to our chapters to reflect it. We’re actively working to evolve the mindset of our members to understand that moments of celebration are extracurricular to their responsibilities and oath as a Greek.”

That’s easier said than done, of course. The primary incentive for joining any frat is still the ability to plug into a prefabricated social network. And on the West Coast, one key rationale for joining Asian American-specific frats is fading as a direct consequence of the same landscape shifts that are turning stereotypical frat-boy culture into an anachronism.

“Given that Asian American frats were originally founded with the purpose of providing a support group for a minority population, a lot of the ones on the West Coast are now having an identity crisis,” says NAPA chair Gee. “You have more and more schools where Asian Americans are now the largest group on campus, or even the majority. Cover up the letters on Frat Row houses at UC campuses, and you’d be hard pressed to tell which ones are the ‘Asian’ frats. So what’s the new role of historically Asian fraternities and sororities? How do our groups need to transition, in order to stay relevant?”

It’s a question that organizations of all kinds have to ask themselves, given the sweeping consequences of America’s ongoing cultural redefinition. And one that should be answered with the measured rationality of “Harold and Kumar”’s Tarik, who the heroes encounter in jail. “Look at me,” he says, explaining how he was wrongly imprisoned by the same cop who arrested our protagonists. “I’m fat, black, can’t dance, and I have two gay fathers. People have been messing with me my whole life. I learned a long time ago there’s no sense getting all riled up every time a bunch of idiots give you a hard time. In the end, the universe tends to unfold as it should.”

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The Tao Jones Index

Must-click quick-hits from across Asia and Asian America.

Movie Date:

I talked at length about “21 and Over” with The Takeaway’s Kristen Meinzer and Newsday’s Rafer Guzman on their podcast Movie Date. Check it out!

The Real Oxford Asians:

After a Miamu University of Ohio student set up a Twitter feed mocking MU Asian and Asian American students, a group of Asian Americans put together this site to provide a nuanced, three-dimensional view of what it really means to be an Asian at a big midwest college.

Ang Lee’s Oscar celebration:

Swank party? Swilling champagne with the swells? Not for Best Director winner Ang Lee. He headed out to his fave burger joint, In’n’Out, for a double-double — Oscar style. Bonus Ang Lee love: This essay, originally published in Chinese and translated by Irene Shih, which talks about his “Never Ending Dream” — which began to come true only when he made his first film, at age 38.

Beyond the Bad and the Ugly:

Will you be in Los Angeles on March 23? Join me and a bunch of smart and interesting Asian American writers, performers, creators and thinkers at the Japanese American National Museum for “Beyond the Bad and the Ugly,” the first-ever Summit on Asian American Stereotypes! Tickets available here. And if you won’t be in L.A., consider supporting our IndieGoGo campaign to put the event online, here.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.